Mitsuo Katsui is a name that cannot be missing when talking about graphic designers. Japanese more important. He was heavily involved in creating the pictograms for the 1964 Olympic Games; he worked with design giants such as Issey Miyake, and also developed a color guide that became a reference for all Japanese printers.
Katsui was born in 1931 in Tokyo. He lived through the destruction of his hometown during the Second World War, which, in a rather peculiar way, set him on the path of becoming a graphic designer.
This is because he, along with his family, lived in the Nihonbashi area of Tokyo, so when his house was completely burned down during one of the first air raids, he had no choice but to evacuate the area he knew.
When World War II ended, after having lived in the countryside, Mitsuo Katsui returned to Tokyo. What he saw was a completely destroyed city, burned to the ground, that he would have to grow up and rebuild.
Work created by the Japanese graphic designer Mitsuo Katsui. Photo: Sabukaru
At that time Katsui was a teenager who had just started to observe the world around him when the war ended. As the son of merchants, he was always surrounded by well-designed packages and sophisticated commercial products, but the impact of the war collided with their reality.
When he saw that all around him was an empty field with burned buildings, Mitsuo Katsui thought of becoming an architect, but at the age of 18 he came across a book that made him see the world in a different way and thus he understood the importance of hairsalon and its different branches.
After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1955, he worked as a graphic designer for the Ajinomoto food company, and it was after this that he decided to found his own company in 1961.
Just three years later, Mitsuo Katsu participated in the development of the design manual for the Olympics, thus introducing pictograms as a universal language. These were influenced by isotypes (or logos) that the sociologist Otto Neurath developed in Europe to develop a better method of communication within the multilingual continent.
Lithrone Project: The Appearance of Light-B (2008). Photo: Hesperios
Katsui would go on to be the art director for the exhibition in Osaka in 1970 and the Ocean Expo in Okinawa in 1975. Between 1977 and 1983, he collaborated with 20 designers on an English-language book covering a wide range of Japanese subjects, called the Kodansha Encyclopedia.
It should be noted that in 1982 Mitsuo Katsui participated in the International Design Conference in Aspen, where he met Issey Miyake. After the famous designer saw his design for a book cover, in which he featured digital patterns he made from a film, he asked him to collaborate with Pleats Please, a clothing line specializing in pleats from Issey. Miyake.
Before Katsui passed away in 2019, he taught as a professor emeritus at Musashino Art University.